Influx of Cash in Asia Raises Familiar Worries

HONG KONG — To all the concerns that cloud Asia’s growth prospects next year — the fiscal measures set to take effect in the United States, the euro zone debt crisis and the uncertain growth trajectories of China and Japan — add one more: a renewed flood of cash into some of the region’s more dynamic economies.

Asia’s fast-growing economies have weathered a tough 2012 relatively well, and economists say that unless the U.S. and euro zone economies take a sharp hit in 2013, the region could pick up steam again next year.

But that good news comes with a price tag. Analysts have begun to warn recently that Asia’s relative economic buoyancy could once again attract large amounts of cash, possibly leading to a repeat of what happened two years ago.

Back then, big inflows, mostly from the West, caused many emerging-market currencies to surge and prompted talk of “currency wars” as central bankers scrambled to keep their currencies from rising too fast.

Now, with growth in Asia picking up, and central banks in developed nations stepping up their efforts to oil the wheels of their beleaguered economies, the influx of cash is again starting to have worrying side effects.

Property prices, for example, have risen across much of the region. The South Korean won has climbed more than 5 percent against the U.S. dollar since late August. The Philippine peso has risen about 4 percent, to its highest level since early 2008. The Taiwan dollar, the Thai baht and the Malaysian ringgit also have strengthened.

“We could be heading back towards where we were in 2010,” said Frederic Neumann, regional economist at HSBC in Hong Kong. “Capital is pouring back into emerging Asia.”

Next year, said Rob Subbaraman, chief economist for Asia ex-Japan at Nomura in Hong Kong, “could be a bumper year” for net capital inflows. “The stars are aligned.”

For many parts of the world, a tide of capital would be a blessing. The United States, Europe and Japan have spent much of the last four years trying to reinvigorate their economies by lowering rates and injecting cash into strained financial systems through purchases of financial assets.

More is in store.

Last Wednesday, the U.S. Federal Reserve announced that it would continue to buy large amounts of Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities until the job market improved.

Likewise, the Japanese central bank may step up its existing asset-buying and lending program at a policy meeting this week, analysts believe.

Over the years, some of that liquidity has seeped into parts of the world where growth is faster and returns are higher. The amounts of money flowing into developing Asia have, at times, been vast. During the rush in late 2009 and 2010, David Carbon, an economist at DBS in Singapore, estimated, the region saw inflows to the tune of $2 billion a day, for example.

Economists at the Japanese bank Nomura estimate that between early 2009 and mid-2011, net capital inflows to Asia, excluding Japan, totaled $783 billion — far more than the $573 billion that came in during the preceding five years.

The renewed inflows in recent months have not been so large. Moreover, not all countries have attracted cash in equal measure. Investors have been wary this year of India’s seeming inability to push through important economic overhauls, for example. That has caused the rupee to sag more than 11 percent since February. China, meanwhile, restricts incoming foreign investments to relatively small amounts.

Elsewhere in the region, however, there are signs of renewed pressure.

An index compiled by Nomura that gauges capital inflow pressures has risen in recent months, said Mr. Subbaraman, the Nomura economist. Although it remains below where it was during the spike in 2010, it is now at its highest since May 2011.

Said Mr. Neumann of HSBC, “currencies have strengthened despite resistant central banks, real estate markets are frothing away, and lending to consumers and companies has accelerated.”

All of that has reignited the concerns that traditionally accompany major — and potentially fickle — capital inflows.

For exporters, stronger currencies are a headache, as they make the exporters’ goods more expensive for consumers elsewhere.

For ordinary citizens, rising property prices make homes increasingly unaffordable. Soaring property prices are also vulnerable to painful reversals if conditions change.

Underscoring that point, the International Monetary Fund warned on Wednesday that a sharp rise in house prices in Hong Kong raised “the risk of an abrupt correction.”

Likewise, a big increase this year in corporate bond issuance — while a positive in that it supports growth and diversifies corporate funding — bears risks.

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Obama Expected to Name Kerry as Secretary of State

WASHINGTON — President Obama is leaning strongly toward naming John Kerry, the Massachusetts senator and unsuccessful Democratic nominee for president eight years ago, to succeed Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state, according to administration officials and friends of Mr. Kerry.

But the announcement will be delayed, at least until later this week and maybe beyond, because of the Connecticut school shooting and what one official called “some discomfort” with the idea of Mr. Obama’s announcing a national security team in which the top posts are almost exclusively held by white men.

The American ambassador to the United Nations, Susan E. Rice, who is black and was considered Mr. Obama’s leading candidate for the job, withdrew her name from consideration last week after opposition to her nomination grew in the Senate.

For Mr. Kerry, 69, the appointment would fulfill an ambition that dates back many years. He had hoped for the post when Mr. Obama was first elected in 2008; since then, he has shepherded the passage of a critical arms-control treaty and conducted a series of quiet missions on behalf of the president, notably at moments of crisis with Afghanistan and Pakistan.

But he would be entering an administration whose primary foreign policy strategies are already set, even as it tries to use American leverage in dealing with a Middle East that is veering toward hard-line Islamist governments and an Iran that is getting perilously close to a nuclear capability.

With Ms. Rice out of the running, Mr. Kerry’s appointment “is the working presumption,” said a senior State Department official who has been preparing for the transition to a new secretary. But White House officials said the deal was not entirely done, because the lineup currently envisioned — with former Senator Chuck Hagel to head the Defense Department and the acting C.I.A. director, Michael J. Morell, likely to be named to the post permanently — looks a bit too much like national security teams of a previous era.

For Mr. Obama, a national security team led by Mr. Kerry and Mr. Hagel, and their longtime colleague in the Senate, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., would be deeply experienced but also, in many ways, deeply conventional. All three were in the Senate during the cold war, long before Mr. Obama came on the political scene. All describe themselves as pragmatists rather than ideologues, and all became skeptics, then critics, of the American experiment in Iraq from the early days of the war.

Still, administration officials said, for now there are no serious candidates for the State Department job other than Mr. Kerry. He would be the first white man to serve in the post since Warren Christopher left the job in early 1997. His successors have been Madeleine K. Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Kerry’s colleagues in the Senate have said that he would sail through confirmation hearings. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, has already begun jokingly calling Mr. Kerry “Mr. Secretary.” Both men are veterans of the Vietnam War and worked together to provide President Bill Clinton with political cover to grant diplomatic recognition to Vietnam. Mr. McCain said of Mr. Kerry recently that he would most likely win a large number of Republican votes for confirmation.

The issue of the composition of Mr. Obama’s team arose anew when Ms. Rice withdrew. If she keeps her current post as ambassador to the United Nations, she will remain in Mr. Obama’s cabinet and on his national security team. She is also considered the likely successor to Thomas E. Donilon as national security adviser. But Mr. Donilon does not intend to leave that post for a year or two, his friends say, unless he is named White House chief of staff.

Michèle A. Flournoy, a former under secretary of defense for policy, remains a candidate to become the first female defense secretary. But in internal discussions, White House officials have said that the challenge of the next few years will be working with Congress to shrink the defense budget and kill some major cold war-era weapons systems. For that, Mr. Hagel, a Republican from Nebraska, is seen as better able to win votes from his former colleagues.

Ms. Flournoy has also been mentioned as a possible C.I.A. director, but Mr. Morell, who ran the analysis division of the agency, is the favorite of C.I.A. officials. “Mike has been concerned about the over-militarization of the C.I.A.,” a senior military officer who has dealt with him said recently. “And so are many at the agency, who fear they have wandered too far from the job of analyzing trends and obtaining secrets.”

John Brennan, a close aide to Mr. Obama and a former agency station chief in Saudi Arabia who has directed counterterrorism activity from his basement White House office, is also a candidate for C.I.A. director. But officials note that his current post already gives him sway over all 18 intelligence agencies.

Mr. Kerry has worked hard to deepen his relationship with Mr. Obama. The president has at times considered him long-winded and a throwback to a previous generation of diplomats, aides said. But Mr. Kerry impressed Mr. Obama and Mr. Donilon when he was sent to deal with Hamid Karzai, the famously unpredictable president of Afghanistan, after Mr. Karzai’s supporters rigged a presidential election in 2009 and refused a second round of voting.

Mr. Kerry also visited Pakistan several times to try to ease recurrent tensions, including a two-week visit after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Pakistani officials tried to get Mr. Kerry to write what they called a “blood oath” that the United States would never take action to seize Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Mr. Kerry found a diplomatic way out, saying the United States had no “designs” on Pakistan’s weapons.

“It meant nothing,” a member of Mr. Obama’s national security team said later. “And it solved the crisis. Quite artfully.”

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iPad shipments could reach 100 million in 2013

Apple (AAPL) sold 42.8 million iPad tablets into channels through the first three quarters of 2012 and the most recent estimates suggest the company could ship 26 million more iPads during the holiday quarter. If Apple does manage to hit that record, total iPad shipments on the year would reach 68.8 million units. As impressive as that would be, however, DisplaySearch analyst David Hsieh thinks 2013 iPad sales could climb as high as 100 million units as iPad mini demand explodes.

[More from BGR: Has the iPhone peaked? Apple’s iPhone 4S seen outselling iPhone 5]

In 2012, Hsieh estimates that 9.7-inch iPad panel shipments — that is, shipments of iPad displays from suppliers to Apple’s manufacturing partners —  will have totaled 70 million units, including 23 million iPad 2 displays and 47 million third- and fourth-generation iPad panels. He also believes Apple’s suppliers will ship 13.6 million iPad mini displays by the end of the year.

[More from BGR: Sony’s PlayStation 4 could lose to the next Xbox before it’s even released]

Next year, however, the analyst sees Apple hitting a major milestone.

“In 2013, it is likely that Apple will adjust its product portfolio to meet the strong demand for the iPad mini,” Hsieh wrote in a post on DisplaySearch’s blog. ”We believe that Apple is targeting total iPad shipments of 100 million in 2013, half accounted for by the iPad mini, and 40 million new iPad and 10 million iPad 2, as production continues at least until the middle of 2013.”

DisplaySearch estimates that more than 170 million tablets will ship in 2013 and Apple’s iPad will account for 60% of the market.

This article was originally published by BGR

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49ers clinch playoff berth, 41-34 over Patriots

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. (AP) — Jim Harbaugh might have learned more about his San Francisco 49ers during 20 minutes of sleepwalking than at any other time in his two years as their coach.

His 49ers turned a nearly historic collapse into a stunning victory and a playoff berth. They withstood a 28-point comeback by the New England Patriots to win 41-34 on Sunday night in the rain.

"Our team has now hung in in a lot of big-time pressure games," Harbaugh said. "They've overcome adversity. They've shown they can do that."

Michael Crabtree took a short pass from Colin Kaepernick and sped around cornerback Kyle Arrington for a 38-yard touchdown with 6:25 to go, then David Akers made a 28-yard field goal to clinch it.

"We can win a shootout," Crabtree said. "Whatever it takes, that's our motto. ... We feel like we can do anything, sky's the limit."

The 49ers (10-3-1) own at least a wild-card spot and play at Seattle next week with a chance to win the NFC West. A loss would bring the division race down to the final weekend.

Kaepernick threw for four touchdowns, two to Crabtree, who had 107 yards receiving. The defense rattled Tom Brady at times, but also yielded 443 yards passing in a sloppy contest between two of the league's more precise teams.

AFC East champion New England (10-4), which had won seven in a row, trailed 31-3 in the third quarter and lost for the first time at home in December in 21 games. The Patriots also had won 21 in a row in the second half of the schedule before San Francisco somehow regrouped late in a game it seemingly had clinched long before.

"I used to live next to a train station in Chicago," Harbaugh said. "And it's like the more you hear the train, the less you hear it. I feel that way with our team in terms of pressure in big games. The more you feel it, the less you feel it."

San Francisco forced four turnovers, matching the number of giveaways New England had at home all season.

But then the Niners began collapsing, and back came Brady and the Patriots on a 6-yard TD run by Danny Woodhead and a 1-yard dive by Brady. A 5-yard pass to Aaron Hernandez and Woodhead's 1-yard run with 6:43 remaining tied it.

And just like that, San Francisco went in front again.

Rookie LaMichael James broke free for a 62-yard kickoff return. On the next snap — the third time the Niners would have a one-play TD drive — Crabtree took a pass on the left side, spun and headed into the end zone.

"We faced adversity," James said. "Nobody flinched."

New England turned over the ball on downs and Akers made his kick. Stephen Gostkowski added a 41-yarder for the Patriots with 38 seconds remaining, but they couldn't recover the onside kick.

San Francisco led 17-3 at the half. And they looked safe after Frank Gore picked up Kaepernick's third fumble and scored on a 9-yard run, followed by Crabtree's 27-yard score in a pinpoint pass from the second-year quarterback.

The defense set up both of San Francisco's TDs in the third.

Dashon Goldson returned Steven Ridley's fumble 66 yards to the New England 3 before Gore found the end zone. Defensive end Aldon Smith, known for his sacks, grabbed a pass out of Hernandez's hands for his first career interception. After he was tackled, Smith ran directly to the sideline and sat down on the 49ers' bench.

He was back up on his feet cheering the next play, when Crabtree broke free to make it 31-3.

"We just spotted them 28 points," Brady said. "We fought hard, but you can't play poorly against a good team and expect to win. We can't miss plays that we have opportunities with."

Still, no one can relax against the Patriots.

Unlike a week ago, when the Patriots routed Houston, they fell behind quickly in the rain and ran only 10 snaps on their opening three series. San Francisco's fearsome pass rush was sharp then, and Brady was hit on the arm twice while trying to pass.

Even worse, his long throw on their third possession for Wes Welker was picked off by Carlos Rogers, who then slalomed his way on the wet turf toward the New England end zone. Only Brady stood in his way at the 5, and Rogers fell trying to elude him.

It was a key stop because Delanie Walker fumbled two plays later.

Earlier, Kaepernick accounted for 60 yards through the air on the 49ers' first drive. Randy Moss showed the kind of elusiveness that made him a record-setter in New England from 2007 until he was traded early in the 2010 by getting behind the secondary for a 24-yard TD.

His short celebration as he faced the crowd drew loud hoots.

Brady preventing Rogers from scoring was about the only highlight for the Patriots in the opening quarter, but the 49ers weren't any more effective beyond their scoring drive and a 38-yard run by Goldson on a fake punt. The slopfest included Akers' being wide left on a 39-yard field goal.

All this from teams ranked 1-2 in fewest giveaways.

"We just didn't even give ourselves a chance," Brady said.

When the Patriots finally got their usually unstoppable offense going, they used 16 plays and converted a fourth down. But they stumbled inside the 10 when Brady was sacked by Ray McDonald. Gostkowski made a 32-yard field goal.

San Francisco answered quickly, helped by a 35-yard pass interference call on Aqib Talib. Walker slipped behind a zone defense for a 34-yard TD pass from Kaepernick, making it 14-3.

Akers made a 20-yard field goal as the half ended, finishing a 15-play, 76-yard drive. The three points were the Patriots' fewest in a half all season, and they were outgained 249-113.

Of course, that turned around in the second half.

Aside from the players' mistakes, the game also was slowed by officiating confusion that led to several lengthy conferences. One delay took about 10 minutes to decide whether 49ers punt returner Ted Ginn Jr., muffed a second-quarter kick.

NOTES: Welker now has 100 catches this season, the fifth time he has reached that number, an NFL record. ... New England has 506 points, the fourth time it has reached 500, also a league mark. ... San Francisco had allowed only 184 points going into the game, lowest in the league. ... Andy Lee averaged 54 yards net on five punts for the 49ers. ... Brady's 65 throws are a career high. ... Brandon Lloyd had 10 catches for 190 yards for New England.

___

Online: http://pro32.ap.org/poll and http://twitter.com/AP_NFL

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Experts Say Thimerosal Ban Would Imperil Global Health Efforts

A group of prominent doctors and public health experts warns in articles to be published Monday in the journal Pediatrics that banning thimerosal, a mercury compound used as a preservative in vaccines, would devastate public health efforts in developing countries.

Representatives from governments around the world will meet in Geneva next month in a session convened by the United Nations Environmental Program to prepare a global treaty to reduce health hazards by banning certain products and processes that release mercury into the environment.

But a proposal that the ban include thimerosal, which has been used since the 1930s to prevent bacterial and fungal contamination in multidose vials of vaccines, has drawn strong criticism from pediatricians.

They say that the ethyl-mercury compound is critical for vaccine use in the developing world, where multidose vials are a mainstay.

Banning it would require switching to single-dose vials for vaccines, which would cost far more and require new networks of cold storage facilities and additional capacity for waste disposal, the authors of the articles said.

“The result would be millions of people, predominantly in low- and middle-income countries, with significantly restricted access to lifesaving vaccines for many years,” they wrote.

In the United States, thimerosal has not been used in children’s vaccines since the early 2000s after the Food and Drug Administration and public health groups came under pressure from advocacy groups that believed there was an association between the compound and autism in children.

At the time, few, if any, studies had evaluated the compound’s safety, so the American Academy of Pediatrics called for its elimination in children’s vaccines, a recommendation that the authors argued was made under the principle of “do no harm.”

Since then, however, there has been a lot of research, and the evidence is overwhelming that thimerosal is not harmful, the authors said. Louis Z. Cooper, a former president of the academy and one of the authors, said that if the members had known then what they know now, they never would have recommended against using it. “Science clearly documented that we can’t find hazards from thimerosal in vaccines,” he said. “The preservative plays a critical role in distribution of vaccine to the global community. It was a no-brainer what our position needed to be.”

Advocacy groups have lobbied to include the substance in the ban, and some global health experts worry that because the government representatives due to vote next month are for the most part ministers of environment, not health, they may not appreciate the consequences of banning thimerosal in vaccines. The Pediatrics articles are timed to raise a warning before the meeting.

“If you don’t know about this, and you’re a minister of environment who doesn’t usually deal with health, it’s confusing,” said Heidi Larson, senior lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who runs the Vaccine Confidence Project.

In an open letter to the United Nations Environmental Program and the World Health Organization this year, the Coalition for Mercury-Free Drugs, a nonprofit group that supports the ban, disputed the assertion that scientific studies had offered proof that thimerosal is safe, and urged member states to include it in the ban.

That it is being used in developing countries, but not developed countries, is an “injustice,” the letter said.

The World Health Organization has also weighed in. In April, a group of experts on immunization wrote in a report that they were “gravely concerned that current global discussions may threaten access to thimerosal-containing vaccines without scientific justification.”

Dr. Larson said she believed that the efforts of pediatricians and global health experts, including the W.H.O., would influence the negotiations in Geneva and that the compound would most likely be left out of the final ban.

“You can’t just pull the plug on something without having a plan for an alternative,” she said.

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Newtown has Mixed Feelings About the Media Horde in Its Midst

NEWTOWN, Conn. — Wolf Blitzer understands that his presence here is not appreciated by some local people, who wish that the TV satellite trucks, and the reporters who have taken over the local Starbucks, would go away and leave them to ache, grieve and mourn in peace.

But he also knows that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School ranks with the national tragedies he has covered: Oklahoma City, Sept. 11, Virginia Tech. So for now the most intimate and heartbreaking of catastrophes and the insatiable, unwieldy beast of global news media are locked in an awkward union in a bucolic New England town that never expected to encounter either.

Mr. Blitzer, the longtime CNN anchor, said the few exhortations to go home he had heard while working here had been far outnumbered by comments from people who thank him for telling Newtown’s story sensitively and who want the world to know what happened here. Still, he said, Newtown is providing a particularly vivid laboratory of how the media report this kind of tragedy.

“If you have people bringing dolls or flowers to makeshift memorials and they’re crying, that’s a powerful image, it’s part of this story, it’s part of our history right now, and we have to deal with it,” he said on Sunday.

This town, of course, has been transformed by unimaginable tragedy. But in a more mundane and presumably transitory way, Newtown and particularly the small community of Sandy Hook have also been transformed by those coming to report on it, a news media presence that has clogged quiet roads, established glowing encampments of lights and cameras, and showed up in force at church services and public memorials.

Nearly every newscast on CNN since Friday night has been broadcast from Newtown. The same has been true for nearly every network television morning and evening newscast. Coverage of other events has been minimized if not scrapped entirely, at least for a few days — sometimes with breathlessly inaccurate results about the massacre. On Friday, there was a succession of reports about the shooting and the gunman that turned out to be wrong: reports about the gunman’s name, about his mother’s occupation, about how he got into the building.

The confusion continued into Saturday when NBC broadcast an exclusive report that the gunman had an altercation with four staff members at the school the day before the shootings, according to state and federal officials. A revised account played down the possibility of an altercation.

Reporters like NBC News’s justice correspondent, Pete Williams, tried to be transparent about the fact that many initial details about the shooting came from anonymous and occasionally contradictory sources.

When Adam Lanza’s brother Ryan’s name circulated widely as the gunman’s name on Friday afternoon, he said “we are being told the name Ryan,” but cautioned that “at the end of the day that name might be wrong.”

Despite the errors, Al Tompkins, a senior faculty member at the Poynter Institute, the nonprofit journalism organization, said he was “touched and impressed by the nonstop coverage so far.” He said he had not seen any children interviewed without a parent nearby.

Some news organizations said they had specific rules about such interviews. A spokeswoman for CBS News said that its policy “is not to interview children under the age of 18 before getting permission from a parent.”

While police officials have asked — at times almost begged — the news media to respect the privacy of families that have lost a loved one, reporters and bookers do have to ask. Thus the sight of big-name anchors going door to door this weekend, seeking interviews. They said they know when no means no.

“We are always extremely sensitive to the feelings and the wishes of loved ones,” said Tom Cibrowski, the executive producer of ABC’s “Good Morning America.” But, he added, “There is a time when some do choose to honor their child or the victim, and we can provide a forum.”

Most moving, perhaps, was the eloquent tribute that Robbie Parker paid Saturday in front of TV cameras to his dead 6-year-old daughter, Emilie Alice. Nonetheless, in Newtown, a police officer has been assigned to keep unwelcome visitors away at the homes of the families of each of the dead children.

Some here have had gripes about individual reporters pushing cameras and microphones into the faces of unwilling residents, particularly those leaving the firehouse in grief on Friday after receiving news about what happened at the school.

Still, Michael Burton, the second assistant chief at the firehouse, who said he witnessed some intrusive reporters, also said the coverage has been a blessing beyond sharing the town’s grief.

A fire department in Texas, learning of the Christmas tree sale at his firehouse, bought the two trees that became the center of a memorial at the bridge leading up to the school. Someone in North Carolina bought another 26, one for each of the slain children and school personnel, all now adorned in a green tribute leading up to the school.

“If not for the media coverage, none of that would have happened,” he said.

On Sunday morning, Eric Mueller, an art teacher at a private school in New Haven, began hammering 27 wooden angels that he and eight friends had constructed into the ground in front of his house in Newtown. Within minutes, he was joined by more than a dozen reporters and photographers. “My wife said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t talk to the press,’ ” he said.

He said his gesture was for the residents of Newtown, not for the world. But he said he had no problem with the news media descending on the town.

“I’m fine with it right now. I’ll go back in the house and be done with it and let the angels speak for themselves.”

Peter Applebome reported from Newtown, Conn., and Brian Stelter from New York.

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The Hard Road Back: Chaplain with Traumatic Brain Injuries, Finds Tables Turned

A Counselor in Need:
Sent home from Iraq, Lt. Col. Richard Brunk, an Army chaplain, returned to Houston, where he is learning to cope with a serious brain injury.

It was Lt. Col. Richard Brunk’s second Sunday in Baghdad, and so, of course, there was church. Only 16 soldiers showed up, but that was good for that busy day, election day across Iraq. The presiding chaplain asked everyone to take seats up front. It was a providential move.

A 122-millimeter rocket exploded outside, virtually collapsing the rear of the chapel. Colonel Brunk was pitched forward, an outstretched arm failing to stop his head from hitting the marble floor. Gathering himself amid the chaos, he noticed some foil-wrapped chocolates scattered like pebbles before him and offered one to the chaplain, sprawled on the ground nearby.

“If I’m going to die, it’s going to be with chocolate on my breath,” the colonel said jokingly. The chaplain moved his lips in reply. “And I realized: ‘Uh oh, I’ve got a problem,’ ” Colonel Brunk recalled. “Because I couldn’t hear him.”

The explosion broke Colonel Brunk’s wrist, shattered both his eardrums and rattled his skull, medical records show. It would be the first of two major blasts in 2005 that traumatically injured his brain.

Seven years later, the symptoms have not gone away. Colonel Brunk, who retired from the Army this summer, regained his hearing, but he still has daily headaches, ringing in his ears, double vision and dizziness, all typical of traumatic brain injury, or T.B.I. Occasionally he struggles to remember once-familiar words, faces and names.

The military says it has diagnosed more than 260,000 cases of T.B.I. since 2000, about 42,000 of them involving deployed troops. That is less than 2 percent of the service members sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, and many experts believe that the actual number is higher. Though three in four of those cases were labeled “mild,” many veterans like Colonel Brunk have struggled with powerful aftereffects for years.

In his case, age has been a factor. A chaplain himself, Colonel Brunk was 54 when he was injured, a rarity in these wars, where 99 percent of the 2.3 million troops who deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan were under 50. Now 62, he faces a much steeper path to recovery than a younger person, doctors say.

But emerging research shows that traumatic brain injuries may have long-term effects on troops of all ages. A study by the University of Oklahoma this year, for instance, found that a majority of veterans treated at a traumatic brain injury clinic continued having headaches, dizziness and poor coordination eight years after their injuries.

Data from the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy at Boston University suggests that multiple traumatic brain injuries during one’s youth may be linked to degenerative brain disease later in life.

Colonel Brunk’s story underscores another important issue: how poorly the military understood brain injuries early in the wars.

Since 2009, the Pentagon has required troops suspected of having head injuries to rest immediately after blast exposure, a crucial period when brains can often heal themselves, doctors say.

But in 2005, Colonel Brunk was allowed to return to work within hours of his first exposure. When doctors eventually recognized that he had neurological damage, he was sent home for about three months but was treated mainly for hearing problems. He was then permitted to return to Iraq, at his own request, where he had a second, potentially devastating head injury.

He had gone to war not expecting to experience warfare quite so intimately. But once he was hurt, he was determined to rejoin his battalion and finish the tour with his flock. And like many of those soldiers, he did his level best to ignore injury, pain and, eventually, a collapsing marriage.

“I went to Iraq a chaplain,” Colonel Brunk says. “But I came home a soldier.”

But to those close to him, his dogged good cheer was a mask that did not always serve him well. “People look at him and say, ‘That’s Chaplain Brunk, he can’t be having problems,’ ” said Kathy Curry, a close friend. “But he’s got problems at home. He’s got T.B.I. He’s got pain.”

And so, not long after meeting him, Ms. Curry felt compelled to ask: Who counsels you? Who counsels the counselor?

The answer, for a time at least, was nobody.

He had wanted to be a doctor, but college microbiology killed that notion. So he followed his father, an Army chaplain, into the ministry, leading Texas parishes of the Evangelical Lutheran Church while volunteering as chaplain for fire departments and hospitals. But the military, a family tradition, called.

In the fall of 1989, Colonel Brunk found himself chatting with an Army chaplain recruiter at a church convention in New Orleans. By the end of their stroll down Bourbon Street, the minister had signed on for the Texas National Guard. He was 39.

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U.S. gun website sued for alleged ties to slayings

CHICAGO (Reuters) – A prominent U.S. gun control group on Wednesday sued a gun auction website it says is linked to a mass shooting at a Wisconsin spa in October and the stalker slaying of a woman near Chicago in 2011.

The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence alleges that the design of armslist.com facilitates illegal online sales to unlawful gun buyers with no background checks, and enables users to evade laws that permit private sellers to sell guns only to residents of their own state.

“We as a nation are better than an anonymous Internet gun market where killers and criminals can easily get guns,” said Jonathan Lowy, the Brady Center’s Legal Action Project Director, in a statement.

The wrongful death lawsuit was filed in Cook County Circuit Court on behalf of the family of Jitka Vesel, 36, an immigrant from the Czech Republic who was shot and killed last year by Demetry Smirnov, a stalker.

The suit, which the Brady Center says is the first of its kind, alleges that Smirnov illegally bought the gun from a private seller he located through armslist.com.

Vesel was killed in the parking lot of the Chicago-area Czechoslovak Heritage Museum, where she was a volunteer preparing for a celebration in memory of Czech-American Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak.

Cermak was slain with a handgun during an attempted assassination of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933.

A representative for website owner Armslist, LLC was not immediately available for comment. The company is based in Noble, Oklahoma, according to public records.

The website includes a “terms of use” page on which users must promise they are age 18 or older and will not use the site for illegal purposes.

The Brady Center said that the case does not infringe on the Second Amendment right to bear arms, noting that 74 percent of National Rifle Association members believe that no guns should be sold without a criminal background check.

A representative for the NRA was not immediately available for comment.

Radcliffe Haughton, who killed his estranged wife and two other women and wounded four others before killing himself in a shooting in a Milwaukee suburb on October 21, also got his weapon through armslist.com, according to Wisconsin officials.

Haughton, who was under a restraining order for domestic violence, avoided a background check through a “lethal loophole” by buying a gun through the website, according to a letter to Armslist sent by Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and Wisconsin U.S. Representative Gwen Moore on October 26.

Sales conducted over the Internet also have been linked to mass killings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University. In 1999 eBay announced it was prohibiting online gun sales, according to the Brady Center lawsuit.

Craigslist did the same in 2007. Amazon.com and Google AdWords also prohibits the listing of firearms for sale, the suit says.

An undercover investigation of online gun sales by New York City last year found that 62 percent of private gun sellers agreed to sell a firearm to a buyer who said he probably could not pass a background check.

(Reporting By Mary Wisniewski; Editing by Greg McCune and Xavier Briand)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Butler upsets No. 1 Indiana 88-86 in OT

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — All Butler guard Alex Barlow saw Saturday was space and an opportunity to make a play.

So the unlikeliest player on the floor took a chance and made the biggest shot of the game.

When Indiana's defenders failed to converge on the 5-foot-11 walk-on, Barlow kept right on going through the lane, drove to the basket and hit a spinning 6-foot jumper with 2.4 seconds left in overtime Saturday to give the Bulldogs another stunning upset — 88-86 over No. 1 Indiana in the Crossroads Classic.

"The floater is a shot I work on a lot and I happened to get a lucky bounce," Barlow said. "It was a good feeling."

Luckily for the Bulldogs (8-2), Barlow was on the floor.

The kid who spurned college scholarship offers to play his best sport, baseball, and opted to come to Butler for only one reason — to learn how to coach basketball from Brad Stevens — showed everyone he can hoop it up, too.

Stevens didn't hesitate to constantly keep the ball in Barlow's hands after three key Butler players had already fouled out. The sophomore who had scored only 12 points in nine games this season and 18 in his college career delivered with a series of key plays.

Barlow finished with a career-high six points, came up with a big steal that led to a go-ahead 3-pointer late in overtime and finally won it with a shot that bounced off the back of the rim, straight into the air and finally through the net.

Indiana (9-1) immediately called timeout to set up a play but could only muster Jordan Hulls' heave from near half-court, a shot that faded to the left of the basket and suddenly the first college in Indiana to go to back-to-back Final Fours had another school first — its first win in five tries over a No. 1 ranked team.

The sold-out arena roared as the game ended, and the Bulldogs rushed to midcourt where they celebrated with Barlow.

"I thought he just rose up over Hulls and it looked good," Stevens said. "Don't use this as an excuse to get down on Indiana. I still think they're the team to beat in April. Our guys just played really hard and when it really mattered, they figured out a way."

Butler (8-2) has now won six straight at Bankers Life Fieldhouse, better known as the home to the NBA's Pacers, and four of the last five when this series been played in Indianapolis. The Bulldogs have wins over Marquette of the Big East, North Carolina of the ACC and back-to-back victories over Northwestern and Indiana of the Big Ten.

And Barlow, the surprising star, overshadowed a supporting cast that had strong games, too.

Roosevelt Jones scored 16 points and matched his career-highs with 12 rebounds and six assists before fouling out with 2:03 left in regulation.

Andrew Smith finished with 12 points and nine rebounds and held national player of the year candidate Cody Zeller in check until fouling out just 17 seconds after Jones.

Rotnei Clarke, who transferred to Butler from Arkansas, scored 13 of his 19 points and made three of his five 3-pointers in the second half.

In all, five Bulldogs players finished in double figures while the defense held one of America's most proficient offenses to just 42.9 percent shooting from the field.

"We cost ourselves at the end of the game defensively," coach Tom Crean said after waiting more than an hour to take questions. "They made the plays, there's no question about that. But we made the mistakes on how we guarded them."

The Hoosiers were led by Cody Zeller, who had 18 points, including a layup to tie the score at 86 with 19.3 seconds left in overtime. Victor Oladipo also had 18 points and Will Sheehey scored 13 points off the bench.

But the Bulldogs grabbed 19 offensive rebounds and outrebounded Indiana — the first team to do that this season.

Clearly, this was not the same Indiana team that won its first nine games by an average of nearly 32 points while shooting 51.5 percent from the field.

"There's a lot of things," said Zeller, who had only five rebounds and four baskets. "We got outrebounded. There's a lot of little things that we have to figure, but we'll get back to work and figure them out."

The difference Saturday was that Butler never let the Hoosiers get away from them — even when Smith and Jones went to the bench with four fouls midway through the second half.

Stevens reinserted both players with 9 minutes to go in regulation, trailing 57-50, and the Bulldogs responded with a 12-0 run that gave them a 66-59 lead with 4:31 left in regulation.

Butler still led 71-64 when Jones fouled out, and the Hoosiers answered with five straight points from the free-throw line. They finally tied the score on Yogi Ferrell's 3-pointer from the right wing with 6.1 seconds to go, and Butler's Chase Stigall missed a 3-pointer off the front of the rim as time expired.

In overtime, Indiana looked like it would take control when Zeller's layup made it 84-80 with 2:12 to play.

But the Bulldogs again rallied, getting a 3 from Clarke, a steal from Barlow that led Stigall's 3-pointer, and Barlow's improbable winning shot.

"I just figured I would throw it up to the rim," Barlow said. "If I missed it, I knew they wouldn't get a shot off. Luckily, it bounced in."

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Dr. William F. House, Inventor of Cochlear Implant, Dies

Dr. William F. House, a medical researcher who braved skepticism to invent the cochlear implant, an electronic device considered to be the first to restore a human sense, died on Dec. 7 at his home in Aurora, Ore. He was 89.

The cause was metastatic melanoma, his daughter, Karen House, said.

Dr. House pushed against conventional thinking throughout his career. Over the objections of some, he introduced the surgical microscope to ear surgery. Tackling a form of vertigo that doctors had believed was psychosomatic, he developed a surgical procedure that enabled the first American in space to travel to the moon. Peering at the bones of the inner ear, he found enrapturing beauty.

Even after his ear-implant device had largely been supplanted by more sophisticated, and more expensive, devices, Dr. House remained convinced of his own version’s utility and advocated that it be used to help the world’s poor.

Today, more than 200,000 people in the world have inner-ear implants, a third of them in the United States. A majority of young deaf children receive them, and most people with the implants learn to understand speech with no visual help.

Hearing aids amplify sound to help the hearing-impaired. But many deaf people cannot hear at all because sound cannot be transmitted to their brains, however much it is amplified. This is because the delicate hair cells that line the cochlea, the liquid-filled spiral cavity of the inner ear, are damaged. When healthy, these hairs — more than 15,000 altogether — translate mechanical vibrations produced by sound into electrical signals and deliver them to the auditory nerve.

Dr. House’s cochlear implant electronically translated sound into mechanical vibrations. His initial device, implanted in 1961, was eventually rejected by the body. But after refining its materials, he created a long-lasting version and implanted it in 1969.

More than a decade would pass before the Food and Drug Administration approved the cochlear implant, but when it did, in 1984, Mark Novitch, the agency’s deputy commissioner, said, “For the first time a device can, to a degree, replace an organ of the human senses.”

One of Dr. House’s early implant patients, from an experimental trial, wrote to him in 1981 saying, “I no longer live in a world of soundless movement and voiceless faces.”

But for 27 years, Dr. House had faced stern opposition while he was developing the device. Doctors and scientists said it would not work, or not work very well, calling it a cruel hoax on people desperate to hear. Some said he was motivated by the prospect of financial gain. Some criticized him for experimenting on human subjects. Some advocates for the deaf said the device deprived its users of the dignity of their deafness without fully integrating them into the hearing world.

Even when the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology endorsed implants in 1977, it specifically denounced Dr. House’s version. It recommended more complicated versions, which were then under development and later became the standard.

But his work is broadly viewed as having sped the development of implants and enlarged understanding of the inner ear. Jack Urban, an aerospace engineer, helped develop the surgical microscope as well as mechanical and electronic aspects of the House implant.

Karl White, founding director of the National Center for Hearing Assessment and Management, said in an interview that it would have taken a decade longer to invent the cochlear implant without Dr. House’s contributions. He called him “a giant in the field.”

After embracing the use of the microscope in ear surgery, Dr. House developed procedures — radical for their time — for removing tumors from the back portion of the brain without causing facial paralysis; they cut the death rate from the surgery to less than 1 percent from 40 percent.

He also developed the first surgical treatment for Meniere’s disease, which involves debilitating vertigo and had been viewed as a psychosomatic condition. His procedure cured the astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. of the disease, clearing him to command the Apollo 14 mission to the moon in 1971. In 1961, Shepard had become the first American launched into space.

In presenting Dr. House with an award in 1995, the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Foundation said, “He has developed more new concepts in otology than almost any other single person in history.”

William Fouts House was born in Kansas City, Mo., on Dec. 1, 1923. When he was 3 his family moved to Whittier, Calif., where he grew up on a ranch. He did pre-dental studies at Whittier College and the University of Southern California, and earned a doctorate in dentistry at the University of California, Berkeley. After serving his required two years in the Navy — and filling the requisite 300 cavities a month — he went back to U.S.C. to pursue an interest in oral surgery. He earned his medical degree in 1953. After a residency at Los Angeles County Hospital, he joined the Los Angeles Foundation of Otology, a nonprofit research institution founded by his brother, Howard. Today it is called the House Research Institute.

Many at the time thought ear surgery was a declining field because of the effectiveness of antibiotics in dealing with ear maladies. But Dr. House saw antibiotics as enabling more sophisticated surgery by diminishing the threat of infection.

When his brother returned from West Germany with a surgical microscope, Dr. House saw its potential and adopted it for ear surgery; he is credited with introducing the device to the field. But again there was resistance. As Dr. House wrote in his memoir, “The Struggles of a Medical Innovator: Cochlear Implants and Other Ear Surgeries” (2011), some eye doctors initially criticized his use of a microscope in surgery as reckless and unnecessary for a surgeon with good eyesight.

Dr. House also used the microscope as a research tool. One night a week he would take one to a morgue for use in dissecting ears to gain insights that might lead to new surgical procedures. His initial reaction, he said, was how beautiful the bones seemed; he compared the experience to one’s first view of the Grand Canyon. His wife, the former June Stendhal, a nurse, often helped.

She died in 2008 after 64 years of marriage. In addition to his daughter, Dr. House is survived by a son, David; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

The implant Dr. House invented used a single channel to deliver information to the hearing system, as opposed to the multiple channels of competing models. The 3M Company, the original licensee of the House implant, sold its rights to another company, the Cochlear Corporation, in 1989. Cochlear later abandoned his design in favor of the multichannel version.

But Dr. House continued to fight for his single-electrode approach, saying it was far cheaper, and offered voluminous material as evidence of its efficacy. He had hoped to resume production of it and make it available to the poor around the world.

Neither the institute nor Dr. House made any money on the implant. He never sought a patent on any of his inventions, he said, because he did not want to restrict other researchers. A nephew, Dr. John House, the current president of the House institute, said his uncle had made the deal to license it to the 3M Company not for profit but simply to get it built by a reputable manufacturer.

Reflecting on his business decisions in his memoir, Dr. House acknowledged, “I might be a little richer today.”

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